Morally bankrupt: immigration/deportation policy

Like his predecessors, President Trump is right to assert sovereignty over our national borders. We have the right of all other countries to control the entry of individuals desiring to reside here permanently or temporarily.
With regard to the current global migration crisis, Trump’s also correct when he says that the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world can’t take in and integrate all refugees fleeing war, poverty and violence.
Unlike Trump’s predecessors, however, and to our national shame, the president doesn’t apparently value treating undocumented immigrants humanely. Earlier this month, he announced harsh new policies.
Immigrants caught crossing the border illegally will be criminally charged. Parents will be sent to detention facilities, their minor children to juvenile shelters. We learned earlier this week that the administration is assessing military bases in Texas and Arkansas as suitable shelters for those juvenile immigrants.
Last Friday on NPR, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly defended the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy toward undocumented immigrants.
“A big name of the game is deterrence,” Kelly said, according to the interview transcript.
He rejected that taking kids away from their mother is “cruel and heartless.” They’ll be taken care of, Kelly said, “put into foster care or whatever.” The point, he said, was that the parents elected to enter the country illegally. The hope is that fewer migrants will attempt illegal entry, knowing they risk losing custody of their kids.
Even if, as Kelly asserts, family separation won’t “be used extensively or for very long,” it’s inhumane, barbaric, heartless. Enforcing the policy will be financially costly and traumatize children unnecessarily.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and some 200 child welfare, juvenile justice and child development organizations have repeatedly urged the Trump administration to abandon the use of family separation at the border. And a group of pediatricians have submitted affidavits challenging the policy. It goes against all science-based recommendations for child welfare, they claim.
“Studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the irreparable harm caused by breaking up families,” Colleen Kraft, a pediatrician for 30-plus years wrote in a May 3 op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times.
“Prolonged exposure to highly stressful situations – known as toxic stress – can disrupt a child’s brain architecture and affect his or her short- and long-term health,” Kraft wrote. “A parent or a known caregiver’s role is to mitigate these dangers. When robbed of that buffer, children are susceptible to learning deficits and chronic conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and even heart disease.”
Trump’s new immigration/deportation policies are morally bankrupt. Criminally charging undocumented immigrants at the border and worse, snatching their kids and placing them in juvenile detention or foster care defy moral norms and are the antithesis of common sense and common decency.